You
might remember
War’s
Embers, Hyperion’s two-disc survey of songs that
coalesced around the First World War. This Altara disc,
bearing the title
The Dark Pastoral, covers,
in a single disc, some of the same sort of ground though
in a more compressed way and adds spoken verse
recited by Simon Russell Beale. Thus the focus is subtly
different at least inasmuch as we here concentrate on three
composers – W. Dennis Browne, probably with Butterworth
the most talented of the dead British composers of the
war, Gurney who is now a well known property, and Goossens,
whose songs at least are not.
It’s
right to start with one of the greatest art songs in the
language, Browne’s
To Gratiana. I admit here that
long familiarity with Martyn Hill’s recording has made
it difficult for me objectively to judge other performances
but one must try. I enjoyed Andrew Kennedy’s way with it
but feel honour bound to note the strain in the upper part
of the voice and the lack of Hill’s lyric legato - as well
as Kennedy’s tendency to underline certain words and colour
vowel sounds obtrusively and thus breaking up the line
somewhat.
Dream Tryst is a more rugged, fluctuating
Browne setting adeptly negotiated and Julius Drake comes
into his own here with the lovely lapping piano writing.
Browne’s
Diaphenia is an interesting setting, being
reflective and not attempting the quicksilver of the Whittaker
version so beloved of English tenors – well, it used to
be.
The
Gurney songs offer familiar settings. Kennedy sees
Severn
Meadows rather darkly, melancholically – withdrawn
and blanched.
In Flanders is again rather lacking
in ardency and there’s a strident climax. On the basis
of their performances here the Kennedy-Drake pairing offer
a subdued, interior Gurney whose fleeting, visionary joys
have been knocked out of him.
Collectors
will welcome the Goossens songs because of their rarity
and competence.
Threshold is rightly stern whilst
A
winter-night Idyll employs its subtle impressionism
with great precision, and takes the voice high. After this
the voluptuous, urgent fulsome
Seascape offers a
different kind of contrast.
O cool is the Valley wears
Francophile plumage and there’s a terse, compact setting
of
I hear an army to expand still further the range
of Goossens’s settings. This is valuable work, expertly
done.
Beale’s
readings are warm, intimate and perhaps over-conversational
now and again, though this is very much a matter of taste.
There
are full English texts of all songs and poems, which have
been appropriately and expertly selected for their tensions
and juxtapositions – Browne and Brooke for instance, who
were great friends, Goossens’s seabird in the lovely
All
day I hear the noise of waters nestling next to Hardy’s
The
Darkling Thrush. Clever.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review by Michael Cookson
Andrew Kennedy (tenor) Julius
Drake (piano) Simon Russell Beale (narrator) 
